When the Hershey Bears visited Time Warner Cable Arena in January to play the Charlotte Checkers, Graham Mink checked off another box in his hockey journey.

The Hershey Bears are poised to lead the AHL in attendance for a sixth straight season at Giant Center.
CHRIS KNIGHT, The Patriot-News

The veteran winger has played in all 30 arenas currently in use in the AHL.

Operating from that full-range perspective, Mink rates Giant Center as the best building in the league.

“It’s a great facility,” Mink said. “We’ve got a great locker room. Obviously, I think, the biggest part of it is the attendance and the fans that come in and the atmosphere in here during a game. It doesn’t get any better, in my opinion.

“Other teams might have nights where they get 12,000 or 14,000 or whatever. But on a night-in, night-out basis, it’s a great place to play and a first-rate facility.”

Giant Center, currently celebrating its 10th season as home of the Bears, opened in 2002. It has provided a highly polished block-and-mortar foundation that has helped propel the franchise, now in its 74th AHL season, to phenomenal success at the turnstiles and on the ice.

In their first nine full seasons at Giant Center, the Bears won three of the 11 Calder Cups in club history (2005-06, 2008-09, 2009-10) and advanced to four Calder Cup finals. They set an AHL record with 60 wins in 2009-10.

“When we built the building, we looked at performance and tried to project how well we would do,” said Bill Simpson, president and COO of Hershey Entertainment & Resorts Co., which operates Giant Center. “And we’ve exceeded those expectations. We exceeded them from day one, essentially.

“It’s really put Hershey on the map on a national level, at least regional level, in terms of all the things we can offer from shows to concerts. We lead the league in attendance in hockey by a large margin.”

Shows, marquee PIAA events, meetings and graduations are all on Giant Center’s menu. But the Bears are its prime tenant.

“We left Hersheypark Arena [following the 2001-02 season], there’s no question, with mixed emotions because of the success that the franchise had there and the tradition that that building represented,” Bears President-GM Doug Yingst said.

“The attendance increase is something that is very, very gratifying to the franchise and to the players. I think a lot has to do with the building and the entertainment that the building represents. I think the game night operations and the people that oversee that have done an outstanding job. You’re not only coming to see the Hershey Bears win, you’re coming for a good night out and to see a good event win or lose.”

A Hershey game at Giant Center has typically delivered both at a single-game cost of $25.50 per ticket ($23.50 if purchased in advance) for the lower 100 level and $19.50 per ticket ($17.50 if purchased in advance) for the upper 200 level.

“For me, it’s the premier building in the American Hockey League,” Bears head coach Mark French said. “Not only is it a great venue, it’s a great venue because of the support we garner as well and the atmosphere that is there when we play. I don’t think there’s another venue in the American League that comes anywhere close to rival with it.”

TRANSITION PERIOD

Record-setting performances and 10,000-plus crowds have become routine at Giant Center. That wasn’t the case during the first three seasons in the building.

Moving to Giant Center from Hersheypark Arena marked a cultural change for many Bears fans. The old building provided charm, intimacy and sightlines the new building could never match.

That coupled with a fitful final three years of an affiliation with the Colorado Avalanche, which had peaked with a Calder Cup in 1996-97 in the affiliation’s first season.

“Not all the diehards wanted to come over from Hersheypark Arena into Giant Center,” Yingst said. “There were different [ticket] plans here and different policies.

“It was a meeting place at Hersheypark Arena. This is three times the size, a much bigger building. So there was certainly a transitional period. And then we weren’t winning; we didn’t make the playoffs for two years in a row. So the hockey wasn’t as good as we’d all like to see.”

The Bears made the playoffs in 2002-03, their inaugural season at Giant Center, but were eliminated in the first round by the Chicago Wolves. They drew 312,894 (7,822 average) that season, compared to 244,755 (6,119 average) during their final season at Hersheypark Arena.

Non-playoff seasons followed in 2003-04 and 2004-05, where the respective attendance figures were 298,778 (7,470 average) and 303,797 (7,595 average).

“The first couple years here, it just seemed like the fans weren’t as into it,” said Dan Strawhecker, facility operations manager for Hershey Entertainment. “It wasn’t loud like the old building used to get. Then you could just see the change that’s come over the years.”

The latent turnstile potential of the venue, which has state-of-the-art concessions facilities and more accommodating public spaces than Hersheypark Arena provided, wasn’t fully realized until the Bears began an affiliation with the Washington Capitals in 2005-06 that helped deliver on-ice success.

“I think that winning has a whole lot to do with our attendance,” Yingst said. “I think that if we were on the negative side of the won-loss factor, I don’t think we’d be drawing as good as we could. But the affiliation, I think, as far as the attendance, has been a huge-huge plus. And we hope to keep it going.”

Voluble head coach Bruce Boudreau led the Bears to the Calder Cup in the affilation’s first season, and attendance leaped from 308,092 (7,702 average) in 2005-06 to 346,842 (8,671 average) in 2006-07 and stayed in an upward trajectory. In a way, it presaged a popularity-and-attendance jump the Caps would enjoy after Boudreau was promoted to head coach in Washington in 2007.

Hershey set a single-season club record of 392,005 (9,800 average) in 2010-11 -- the single-season record at Hersheypark Arena was 261,323 in 1994-95 -- and had a club-record 19 sellouts.

For 2011-12, the AHL reduced the regular-season schedule from 80 games to 76, reducing home dates from 40 to 38, so it will be difficult to eclipse that mark. But it still may be possible to break the record for attendance average.

Hershey’s single-game attendance record of 11,002 was set on June 14, 2010, when the Bears clinched the 2009-10 Calder Cup in Game 6 against the Texas Stars. A regular-season record of 10,901 was set this season on Feb. 25 when Norfolk visited.

“It’s become such a family atmosphere for hockey,” Simpson said. “The families that are now there are unprecedented.

“Our fans are incredible. I’ve lived a lot of different places with a lot of different sports franchises. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

When Giant Center was built, a section of the 200 level at the tunnel end of the building was left vacant where seats could be added if demand ever merited it. There are many Bears dates where the demand for seats exceeds capacity, but there currently are no expansion plans.

“We’ve looked at the economics of that,” Simpson said. “Basically, if you look at the way the building is configured, it only would work for hockey. All of that would be behind the stage for concerts and shows.

“You’d literally have to pay that back over the course of 38 hockey games for X-number of years. We have not been able to make those numbers make sense just yet.”

RECRUITING TOOL

Last summer, Ryan Potulny was one of the most coveted free agents on the AHL market.

Salary and NHL opportunity are major factors in determining where a free agent will opt to sign. Potulny said Giant Center also played “a huge role” in his decision to sign with Washington-Hershey.

“It’s no secret around the league that that’s the best building in the league to play in,” Potulny said. “You talk to other guys. We talk in the summertime. As free agents, you want to know kind of the market and what you’re getting into.

“You hear how top-notch the facilities are. Then, once you actually get here, you realize how nice it is. Some of these young guys who start out here, and then maybe go to a different team, don’t realize what they have here until they get somewhere else and say, ‘Wow, it’s quite a difference.’ That’s just a compliment to the Giant Center in itself there.”

Potulny is not alone in being wooed by the building.

“From a recruiting standpoint,” French said, “trying to get players to come to this organization and to the Washington organization, if you’re not going to be in the NHL, there’s no better place to play than Hershey.”

Hershey players enjoy NHL-caliber facilities, from the locker room to the training room to the weight room. There is also a hot and cold tub.

Those intangible benefits help produce tangible results on the ice.

“As a player, I think, some people don’t realize the stuff that you do away from the game to help towards the end of the season,” Potulny said. “It’s the cold tubs and the weight room and the workouts and just staying in shape, keeping your muscle mass up. The facilities, for them to have everything right here, it’s been a lot easier. When it’s there and easy to use, I think, guys use it more.”

Fifth-year Bears defenseman Patrick McNeill has spent his entire career at Giant Center.

“When you go on the road, who knows?” McNeill said. “You might get 500 fans. You might get 2,000 in arenas that are 50 years old or 20 years old.

“Obviously, this building is second to none in the league and the fan support we get is second to none in the league. That’s huge for us. It helps inspire guys when maybe it’s been a tough three-in-three. You come in here on a Sunday and there’s 10,000 people. That really puts the life back in you and helps you play better.”

Giant Center’s big crowds inspire and uplift the home team. Fans also have high expectations and will let the home team know when those expectations aren’t being met.

For visiting teams, the crowd can both inspire and intimidate. Buoyed by filled stands and the challenge of playing the Bears, road teams tend to get up to play at Giant Center, but the people in those filled stands make it clear they’re not there to lend them support.

“Every time you talk to a guy, not so much on the ice but after a game, you talk to guy you know and he says how much fun it is to come here and play,” Bears centerman Keith Aucoin said. “They also say how hard it is to come here and win. It’s a tough place to win.

“It’s not easy for other teams to come in here and play before the crowds. They’re pretty hostile, especially behind the bench. You can see they get pretty hostile with teams.”

Potulny has experienced life on the visitor’s bench.

“Playing in Philly and coming into Hershey, you knew the fans were going to be all over you,” he said. “You knew it was going to be a loud atmosphere. You had to hear that ‘B-E-A-R-S! Bears-Bears-Bears!’ after every goal.

“It helps us. You can look at our first periods this year and see that out of the gates we’ve had some good starts. That’s the fans helping us out and getting us going. Maybe they go a little unnoticed, which they shouldn’t, because they deserve a lot of credit.”

Mink, in his third Hershey stint, also has lived both sides of the Giant Center experience.

“I certainly was envious before I came here,” he said. “And then when you come back when you’re on a different team, it gets you excited to play.

“There’s a lot of people. There’s a lot of excitement. It’s a nice building. It feels like the NHL when you’re here.”

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